Categories

Archives

King Of Leather

Last Tuesday, the debonair and ever entertaining Kenneth King shared his knowledge of working with leather and suede with a group of sewists at Mood’s NY locale. What. A. TREAT. Leave aside the fact that I could listen to this man talk about cardboard for ninety minutes…he covered enough about this enormous topic to make us all feel like paying Dmitry in leathers a visit straight after.

I had no idea leather was so…manipulable. Is that a word? I don’t feel I should call it manipulative, as I don’t think it’s trying to control my actions behind my back. Unless you count the fact that the mantra I MUST HAZ LEATHER is now on repeat in my head, that could possibly be considered thought control. There are so many ways to mold and shape this material. For example, the dart. You can slice that jammy open and slide it over rather than folding it. Besides making up samples right there and then on his droolworthy vintage Bernina, Kenneth had a glorious handful of leather samples with different seam finishes–just look at that slot seam. I want a full length leather duster, slot seamed from shoulder to floor. How cool would that be?! Several times, Kenneth advised using an “acid green contrast leather, peeking out of a white bodice. And how about a blood red leather paint on the edges of the seam?”

GET OUT OF MY HEAD KENNETH KING.

You can hammer this stuff. Glue it. Tape it. Shave it. (Seriously… with a callus shaver.) And oh, so many new notions to play with…

My sewing desk would be like a mechanic shop! Mechanics, they hold a special place in my heart. My dad owned a gas station, and taught me, to the point where I could diagram it, how a combustible engine worked. I floored my 7th grade english teacher by presenting this information in a paper, and then lecturing the class on it without looking at said paper. Ah, Mr. Schultz. He knew how to push my feminist buttons, and I knew how to wreck his chauvinist view of the world. But I digress.

The insides of Mr. King’s kit. As fellow bloggers Devra and Tricia noted, every time he pulled out a tool, it went back in exactly as it was. I can only imagine the order of his studio. One brave attendee asked to borrow a pencil from his kit to make notes. I almost fell over as I watched her grab a red waxy pencil to scribble with. I have to wonder what would have happened if she’d asked to touch his beloved Bernina…

Now that coat, I DID touch. That’s the lining you’re looking at. THE LINING. The outer shell is made from… wait for it… synthetic hair weave. The leather collar is handstitched with great big thick diagonal swaths. It’s glorious.

Have you worked with leather? Would you? I’m completely smitten, and the leather boots I wore to class obviously say “I’m okay with it.” I kind of want to make a forties cocktail dress out of it.

Comments

Oh, Oona, you don’t even know the half of Kenneth’s fabulousness. You should see him among his adoring fans as he teaches at sewing conferences. And he’s such a down-to-earth, creative person. He posts techniques on ThreadsMagazine.com pretty frequently, and they’re all mind-blowing.

I did slice up an unwanted, worn leather trenchcoat one time, along with the skirt of one of my few surviving high school dresses, to attempt to make a leather messenger bag. DISASTER. No matter how I fiddled with the tension and stitch length, my normally awesome older-model Bernina would have none of it. The stitches skipped and the seams were too fragile to actually hold anything. (It is hiding in the archives of my blog somewhere, and I think I need to go back to my finished projects section and label it as a fail.) I held onto it for years thinking I could fix it, and finally tossed it out in a recent preparing-to-move purge of my bag bin. I do still have some pieces of that trenchcoat left, and I’d love to go back and make myself an obi belt sometime, just so that leather doesn’t have me permanently beat!

Oh, to be in NYC to take in all these sewing lessons. Lace from Khalje, Leather from King. Your already amazing sewing talent is going to go through the roof, Oona. It’s going to be fun to watch…

StephFebruary 11, 2013

But you don’t have to be in NYC. Both Kenneth and Susan travel all over the country to sewing shops and sewing conferences giving classes and workshops. Susan lives in Maryland, and she holds some classes there each year.